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Working in cafés can be wonderful. A clean, well-lighted place with good coffee and relative quiet can be inexpressibly fantastic. I’ve made the rent and written books in cafés. On the other hand, close proximity to others under the influence of caffeine can reveal a certain darkness in the human condition that would otherwise be difficult to notice.

People get bilious. A baby fires his diapers and the café hazmat expert springs into action. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t worry,” says the teenager in the green apron. He’s down on his knees wiping up baby’s spillage with a rag. Mom takes a second before she moves. She says: “Yes. Well. I appreciate your help.” Mom’s friend—an almost identical copy, right down to the French twist and the yoga pants—crosses her arms and looks down at the boy. How do babies contain so much waste? Half of the café pretends it didn’t happen. The other half is smiling. Baby is so charming.

Mom and her friend finally decide to help. They sigh and wipe the drippings off the stroller, the floor. This is a normal thing in their world and mom executes her duties without getting a smudge on her yoga pants. From a certain point of view, this, I know, is admirable. But still, baby contains a gallon of fecal matter and mom contains a gallon of meaningless cooing. How does this happen to a person? These women are in their 30s. They seem oblivious to the fact that they have been speaking very loudly in close proximity to others about absolutely nothing for the last 45 minutes. Who raised them?

I am irritated, yes. I am a misanthrope, maybe. Timon of Yosemite. But I feel bad for the parents of the kid with the crew-cut who’s still down on his knees, apologizing for someone else’s shit. His choice, but still. My inner Nostradamus tells me that if he doesn’t quit this job soon, he’ll be doing that for the rest of his life.

Of course, I don’t have kids. It’s easy to pass judgment when you aren’t constrained to be a guardian of public health because baby has a bowel problem. But what about a pediatric gastroenterologist? I don’t know. Could an expert address this? Maybe mom already covered that angle; though, it seems to me baby would feel a lot better if he wasn’t bathed in his own waste. (Later, when mom goes out to a Lexus RX 350 with chunks of gold glued to the side, I will think this again in less charitable terms, wondering whether dad couldn’t take a day out to see about the health of his boy. But such are my prejudices. We should all foul our diapers and own Lexuses.)

I’m at the big table –the one for the losers who come to the café to work and read quietly. The era of socially egalitarian coffee shops ended with the rise of the Starbucks beast. There is definite class polarization here. Corporate culture and proletarian workforce self-segregate at the little tables by the windows; liberal democrats, professorial types, senior citizens, and other undesirables lurk at the long table in the back. In-between lingers the great murmuring maternity, the guardians of our future, a triple-parked fleet of strollers, an ocean of yoga pants, and the inevitable cloud of post-Yogalates hormonal dismay.

Being a mom is hard, yeah? My mom thought so and I’m sure I didn’t make it easy for her. She was a good mom—in my opinion, the best. And even though my parents stayed married (until my mom’s death from cancer in 2009, after which my father descended into a second perpetual adolescence), she was the one who took care of me on a daily basis. So maybe this is more of a personal moment for me than it seems on the surface.

Is it crazy to think parenting should be a group effort? Sorry guys, bringing home a paycheck doesn’t absolve you of having to mop up the Schmutzigkeit. We don’t want junior to have a lilliputian colostomy before he’s old enough to enjoy solid food. It makes me sad. It’s wrong. And I think just because you can reproduce and have money doesn’t mean you should.

Next to me, a 40-something guy with white shoulder-length hair sniffs and clears his throat. His long-sleeve is buttoned all the way to the top and he has a pair of square rimless glasses (spectacles?) at the end of his nose. He looks over at the baby in disgust and shifts his Kindle two inches away from that side of the room. That’s okay, I saw a different young mother do that with her baby when she looked over at our table. Germs. Competing bacteria. Everyone’s a vector. Everyone wants to eat your child and poo in your laptop case.

Why can’t we just get along? The answer is that we can—as long as everyone stays in the small box they were given at birth. Born in a box: live there, paint the walls all you want, inch a tiny mirror over the top edge to see what it’s like in the other boxes, sure. But try to climb out and everyone will destroy their diapers.

Said incontinent baby is now squealing in hideous misery while mom is sipping a latte and laughing with her friend. I really hope baby grows up to run with wild horses over the hills. You can always hope.

The kid in the apron has brought out a mop and bucket. Mom and friend ignore him.

Recently, someone wrote to me wanting to know how I could support myself doing what I do. It was a legitimate and sincere question that nevertheless had undertones of skepticism. The writing life? Really? Just admit you’re flipping burgers in the back of some cantina, why don’t you. And my answer was that I really am doing this the way I say I am. It’s not impossible—hard sometimes, but never impossible. The bottom line is that I’m doing exactly what I want to do in life.

So why the incredulity? Why the outrage? I think it stems from the ingrained assumption that leading a responsible, hard-working life is at odds with fun and satisfaction. When I worked in law, my supervising attorney used to say, “Sleep is for the weak” and “If you’re smiling, you’re not working hard enough.” I hated that and I suspect that such traditional attitudes about work and life begin with western religious assumptions about what we’re here to do and where we’re headed—assumptions many of us would rather do without. It’s also hard not to see a telling interface between this aspect of conformist culture and consumerism.

Then again, I firmly believe that once we start making small decisions about what we want, once we start saying no to the bullying mechanisms of conformist culture (see Office Space for a great hilarious treatment of this), the way we see the world begins to change. Things we thought were dull and boring begin to reveal hidden dimensions. Fears evaporate. It’s like learning to swim: at first, we sank like stones but then we learned to see the water differently and we were able to do something amazing: float weightlessly. Sure, I love college teaching, but I love it primarily as something fascinating in itself, not as a support system or security blanket. I don’t have any fear of the non-academic life. I’m still a writer no matter where I am.

Moreover, I find it interesting that we are encouraged to assume that there is a fundamental disconnection between the mundane and the extraordinary in our everyday lives. Why is this? And why do we support belief systems dedicated to showing us how monotonous and empty our lives can be?

As someone who has spent a good amount of time in academia as well as making a living doing somewhat unconventional self-directed things—freelance writing, teaching fiction writing online, editing, even surviving for a while in college as a professional tarot card reader—I’ve come to recognize the inherent strangeness and fluidity of so-called normal life.

As the linguist, Patrick Dunn, has written, we might legitimately see the world “not as a constant interaction of immutable laws—although often and in may ways it is—but as an ever-changing interaction of arbitrary and constantly shifting symbols.” Realizing that we have a considerable degree of semantic control over our lived experience should make us pause and ask why we are living the life we’re living. Shouldn’t it?

Thinking about this has opened a lot of doors for me, doors of perception, doors of experience. When I ask what is the meaning of life? I only hear the echo of my own voice. And I used to think that this meant life was essentially meaningless. But I don’t think that anymore. Now I suspect that looking outside myself for an answer is tantamount to expecting a fixed meaning from some immutable hierarchy of values. All cosmological assumptions serve power in some way and very few of them are in place to empower or enlighten the individual.

Now I tend to agree with Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” The echo that comes back is the answer: the meaning of life is in the act of interpreting it. And so I think again about everyday life, about the experience of being alive in a dance of symbols and interlocking value systems. It’s incredibly strange to see life this way—to drop the ancient fictions associated with fixed categorical thinking and instead see experience as a matter of Will to Meaning, of interpretation.

After I sent a response along these lines to the person who asked me whether I was really, truly, honestly living the writing life, she followed up with: “But doesn’t it bother you that you’re not famous yet?”

I’m not?

All the dogs in my neighborhood know me as that guy with the cookies in his pocket. When the balance of my life is behind me, what will I care about: that my name wasn’t a household word or that I was able to say, life means THIS!

Creating reproductions of other works requires an extremely high level of technical proficiency. One’s subject matter will always be personal, but I want to encourage my students to deliberately acquire new technical skills by taking on the aesthetic of the writers they read.

In this sense, every text is a potential writing instructor. I have taught myself a lot by doing this assignment. For example, by imitating Melanie Rae Thon‘s imagistic descriptions, I learned how to make an idiosyncratic first person voice graphic. By imitating Hemingway, I learned greater control of the line, of syntax, as a mode of characterization. By imitating Thom Jones, I learned to appreciate tragicomic realism, which led me to the work of Denis Johnson, which ultimately led me to Maupassant and Isaac Babel.

I want my students to learn to see how one writer connects to another stylistically and thematically. I tell them to imitate everyone. Fill notebook after notebook. This is how one practices, how one acquires a technique that can render and evoke anything the story needs at any point.

And it never ends. We should use the library as the ultimate resource for self-education, the ultimate art studio. None of this will cause a writer to forget herself or her own voice. On the contrary, it will enrich her style, inform her subject matter, and teach her more about who she is as a working artist.

Welcome . . .

I write fiction and nonfiction for magazines, work as a freelance writer / editor / journalist, and teach composition and fiction writing.

This blog is mostly dedicated to travel essays, creative non-fiction, discussions about books, the MFA experience, publishing, and short stories I’ve already placed in magazines. But I might write anything.

Ko-fi allows me to receive income from fans of my writing. Anyone who clicks the link can support me with a with a ‘coffee’ (a small payment that is roughly equal to the price of a coffee).

“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say. It’s one reason why we read poetry, because poets can give us the words we need. When we read good poetry, we often say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I feel.’” — Ursula K. Le Guin

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“If I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.”

“Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut. So you think to yourself, My work will live on. As I’ve said many times, rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I would rather live on in my apartment.” — Woody Allen

“At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.” — Charles Bukowski

“You could lose it, your right big toe, leave it here, in this mud, your foot, your leg, and you wonder, how many pieces of yourself can you leave behind and still be called yourself?”

— Melanie Rae Thon, First, Body

Subjects

Subjects

“After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.” — Ernest Hemingway